Vice-Chair: James Fallon, PhD

James H. Fallon, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Anatomy & Neurobiology and Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois (1975) in Neuroanatomy and Physiology and Masters in psychology and psychophysics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He holds a Honorary Doctorate from St Michael’s College, a Sloan Fellowship, Senior Fulbright Fellowship (Africa) and NIH Research Career Award. He was Chair of the UCI Faculty and Academic Senate and Chair of the UCI College of Medicine Faculty. He is sits on numerous corporate boards and national think tanks for science, biotechnology, the arts, and the US military. He is a Subject Matter Expert in the field of “cognition and war” to the Pentagon’s Joint Command.

His research program is focuses on four areas, including adult stem cells, chemical neuroanatomy and circuitry, higher brain functions, and brain imaging. Human Brain Imaging: Extensive collaborations with clinical and basic researchers on imaging genetics studies of depression, schizophrenia, tobacco use, language disorders, personality, intelligence, male-female differences in cognition, consciousness and anesthesia, human cortical development, sleep, emotional memory, imaging genetic studies of psychiatric disorders, modeling of neural circuits, and law, culture, psychopathy, murder, dictatorships, and the brain. Fallon’s lab was the first to find how to mobilize massive numbers of adult stem cells to reverse the deficits in models of chronic stroke and Parkinson’s disease, which was recently heralded as one of the top seven breakthrough findings of the decade. His lab is also creating new neural interfaces for advanced prosthetic limbs and neural chips. Fallon and his colleagues are interested in the neural circuitry and genetics of creativity, artistic talent, extraordinary abilities, psychopathology, criminal behavior, and levels of consciousness. Most recently in the past two years, he has appeared in over thirty national and international TV and radio specials on dictatorships, psychopathic behavior, murder and violence.